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John started. “You’re... going?” If this fading thing wasn’t over, he couldn’t rely solely on Ruben to keep him opaque

enough.

“Where are you going?” asked Ruben.

“Corpus Christi.” She looked at John pointedly.

“Maybe,” John said, “I’ll come with you.”

“No,” she said curtly. “I’ll be fine. I’ll see you when I get back.”

“John should come,” said Ruben. “We should—”

“ We ?” she asked.

“Of course I’m going!”

“Maybe I want to go alone.”

“Oh. You do?”

“Not exactly. But I could want to.”

Ruben grinned. “But you don’t. So that answers that.”

If Ruben left town, there’d be no one to keep John from fading away. He cleared his throat. “There’s that meeting with Maximum

Peace.”

“What!” cried Ruben. “Seriously?”

“In a few days from now. Sorry, I thought I’d mentioned it. Persephone will probably be gone.”

Ruben’s expression fell. “There’s no way to—”

“Of course it can’t be rescheduled. Maximum hardly had time for the meeting as it was. But if you can’t go...”

Ruben turned to Persephone. “There’s no way you can postpone, huh?”

“It’s fine, really. I was planning to go on my own anyway.”

“All right.” Ruben was still frowning. “If you really think it’ll be OK.”

“It will be.”

“So you’re going back home?” Ruben asked Persephone. “That’s cool.”

John relaxed. He wouldn’t be vanishing into nothing just yet.

Persephone hadn’t looked at him all this time, and she addressed Ruben when she replied, “I have a brother. It’s a long story,

but suffice to say, I need to go.”

“No.” Ruben shook his head. “I don’t want you going alone.” He turned to John. “I really appreciate you getting me that meeting.

Sorry you went out of your way. I won’t even ask you to ask them if he can reschedule. I know dude’s too busy for that.”

“Probably,” John said tensely.

“Hey,” Persephone said, “maybe I can talk to William? See if he can get a rescheduled meeting?”

“It’ll be impossible,” John said.

“But—”

“I’ll see to it,” he said, effectively cutting her off.

“Well,” said Ruben, “I am so ready for a cross-country road trip.” Of course he would be.

John didn’t want to hurt Ruben or Persephone, but he would not allow himself to fade into oblivion, not when there was still

a chance he could find his House. And so there was only one option. “I want to go. Really. I insist.”

20

The next morning, John waited in a dark vocal booth, staring through the huge glass window into the engineering room.

Riley stood behind the soundboard, bobbing his head to the music that came ever so slightly through the headphones propped on a screen behind John.

John couldn’t use headphones because firstly, no one was supposed to know he could touch and hold things, and secondly, he wasn’t so sure he’d be able to maintain the headphones on his head, anyway.

So they played the music low in the headphones ( You gotta hear the beat, but it’s the best we can do to keep the track from bleeding too much into the mic, man ) and propped them away from the microphone.

John spoke loudly into the mic. “What do I say?”

The music stopped. The engineer kept his finger pressed against a button and Riley’s voice came through the headphones behind

John. “Whatever comes to mind.”

John said nothing.

Riley circled his index finger in the air and the engineer resumed playing the music.

“Hmm... well... I’m John. And...”

It was supposed to be a few lines, maybe a message for the people, but John didn’t want to talk about the Grey House and the

Ocean. It was still too personal to share with a world of strangers.

He took a breath. What did people need to hear?

“All right man, I think we got it.”

John started at Riley’s voice coming through the headphones.

“What’s that?”

Riley pushed the talkback. “We’re just comping some stuff. Then Keller needs to break for lunch. Had him up all night, you

know? But we should be good.”

John glanced at Hannah. In her little corner of the studio room she typed busily into her mobile, lips pursed in irritation.

She wasn’t happy about his trip to Corpus Christi today—and without Bean, no less—but she’d accepted John’s decision, however

grudgingly.

21

John stood in the back of a building in a tiny car park, staring down at a garden bursting with blooms and bees. So much life,

so much purpose and beauty and interdependence. But also... simplicity.

“John,” a woman said as she stepped outside to stand beside him. “Sounds great in there.”

“Hello. Ah, thank you?”

The woman cocked her head. “They’re still comping, but I wanted to see you off—” The sun came round the clouds and she stepped

close. Her eyes widened, her shoulders stiffened.

John looked down at himself and watched as the swirling golden motes that formed his body faded. He could see the flowers

more clearly through his black jeans, now.

“You all right?” the woman asked in a hushed voice.

Her expression and the way she spoke indicated that she knew him, that he should know her. And yet... “Of course. Sure,

I am.” He tried to understand what he was doing here.

She looked out past the car park to the street. “Would you rather wait for Persephone and Ruben in the truck?”

Persephone. Ruben. Corpus Christi.

John heaved a sigh. “I’m fine... Hannah.” He remembered her now. “I’ll be all right.”

She appeared unconvinced. “It’s not too late to take Bean with you.”

John shook his head.

When Persephone and Ruben drove into the car park, Hannah nodded. “All right, I’m not going to see you off like your mother.

But enjoy your road trip.” She paused. “You sure you don’t want to give me any more details? City, maybe?”

“See you soon, Hannah.”

“Yeah, see you soon.”

As soon as John got into the car, Ruben whistled.

“It happened just a few minutes ago,” John said, “the fading.” He told them about not remembering where he was and not recognizing

Hannah.

“I think it’s Memory Fade,” said Ruben. “That Grey Dude did a number on you. You fade and your memory fades, too.”

“That’s just great.”

“It isn’t all bad.” Ruben didn’t speak for a few minutes. “OK, good news, bad news?”

“Let’s start with the bad.”

Persephone pulled the car onto the 101 freeway, which was packed with traffic.

“If I had to hypothesize on the spot,” said Ruben, “I’d say that this might be what happens to invisible ghosts. Like, you’re

fading, right? And forgetting things. They’ve forgotten, too—forgotten joy and love and who they used to be, forgotten that

they ever died—plus they’re invisible, so they basically become these energy balls of pure emotion, probably whatever they

were holding on to right when they died. This makes me think the Grey Man really is trying to obliterate you, and his touch

was just a hint of—”

“You mentioned good news,” said John.

“Well, we can hold it off, as long as we don’t let him get to you again. Maybe we can even fix it.”

“That’s a big maybe.”

“Yeah, but you’re the biggest Maybe walking, so we’ve probably got more than a decent shot.” Ruben pulled out a Sandman graphic novel and nestled into his seat.

22

Darkness. No streetlamp in sight.

Ruben snored lightly in the back seat, his head leaned against the window.

John glanced repeatedly at his side-view mirror, anything to not have to stare constantly out into the void around them, but

it was all encompassing. He thought of his time in the House, of sleeping there as if it were the most natural thing in the

world. He found it impossible to sleep here, in the realm of the living, and he realized how important a thing it was for

the conscious human mind to escape. The darkness outside looked a lot like nothingness, like what he might fade into; it looked

a lot like the Grey Man and his fog at its darkest areas; it looked a lot like John’s future without the Grey House, and he

gave a mental shudder.

“You OK over there?” Persephone asked him.

“Why do you ask?”

“You look really faded,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“You always say that. Fine . They should print it on your merch.” She sighed impatiently. “We’re going to have to pull over and do it again.” She wasn’t

exactly enthusiastic.

And frankly, neither was he. He’d set out on the trip determined to take whatever Overlays were offered, but during the ride

he realized he needed to think long term. There had to be something else that could buy him more time, but unfortunately,

he’d have to depend on the energy exchanges until he could figure out what that was.

“The last two times you faded,” she said, “it happened in big jumps. Who’s to say that the next one, you won’t fade completely?

It could happen any minute, any hour. It could happen in five minutes.”

Ruben sniffed, oblivious in his slumber.

She was right, of course. For several moments neither she nor John spoke, radiating resentment for their own reasons.

“Are you afraid?” she said. “About what might happen?”

He didn’t know how to answer that. He didn’t want to say that whether he faded into nonexistence or was doomed to roam the

earth, forever invisible, he was facing a type of death sentence. Why couldn’t things have remained as they were, with him

in the Grey House, before the Grey Man came and ruined everything? “There isn’t a safe place to pull over.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“Ah, that word again.” He looked down the dark road ahead. “The shoulder is narrow. And anyway, there might be some maniac

lurking in the tumbleweeds.”

He thought of the Grey Man’s smoky silhouette. He doubted he could regain possession of the House without dealing with the

Grey Man, yet John was no closer to getting back into the House than he had been when he’d first gotten kicked out of it.

Persephone was still going on about the maniac. “There could be one at the next rest stop. More likely, probably. That’s where all their potential prey come to pee. And anyway, what could you do to stop them? I doubt you can hit anyone hard enough to hurt.”

She had a point. “Scare him, maybe? I could play the ghost card.”